ransomware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Digital storage giant Western Digital confirmed that an "unauthorized third party" gained access to its systems and stole personal information belonging to the company's online store customers. "This information included customer names, billing and shipping addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers," the San Jose-based company  said  in a disclosure last week. "In addition, the database contained, in encrypted format, hashed and salted passwords and partial credit card numbers. We will communicate directly with impacted customers." The development comes a little over a month after Western Digital  divulged  a "network security incident" on March 26, 2023, prompting the company to take its cloud services offline. A subsequent report from TechCrunch last month  revealed  that the threat actors behind the attack were allegedly in possession of "around 10 terabytes of data" and were negotiating with Western Digital for a ra...

Just a few short years ago, lateral movement was a tactic confined to top APT cybercrime organizations and nation-state operators. Today, however, it has become a commoditized tool, well within the skillset of any ransomware threat actor. This makes real-time detection and prevention of lateral movement a necessity to organizations of all sizes and across all industries. But the disturbing truth is that there is actually no tool in the current security stack that can provide this real-time protection, creating what is arguably the most critical security weakness in an organization's security architecture.  In this article, we'll walk through the most essentials questions around the challenge of lateral movement protection, understand why multifactor authentication (MFA) and service account protection are the gaps that make it possible, and learn how Silverfort's platform turns the tables on attackers and makes lateral movement protection finally within reach. Upcoming We...

Every week seems to bring news of another data breach, and it's no surprise why: securing sensitive data has become harder than ever. And it's not just because companies are dealing with orders of magnitude more data. Data flows and user roles are constantly shifting, and data is stored across multiple technologies and cloud environments. Not to mention, compliance requirements are only getting stricter and more elaborate.  The problem is that while the data landscape has evolved rapidly, the usual strategies for securing that data are stuck in the past. Gone are the days when data lived in predictable places, with access controlled by a chosen few. Today, practically every department in the business needs to use customer data, and AI adoption means huge datasets, and a constant flux of permissions, use cases, and tools. Security teams are struggling to implement effective strategies for securing sensitive data, and a new crop of tools, called data security platforms, have appear...

The threat actors behind  RTM Locker  have developed a ransomware strain that's capable of targeting Linux machines, marking the group's first foray into the open source operating system. "Its locker ransomware infects Linux, NAS, and ESXi hosts and appears to be inspired by  Babuk  ransomware's leaked source code," Uptycs said in a new report published Wednesday. "It uses a combination of  ECDH  on Curve25519 (asymmetric encryption) and  Chacha20  (symmetric encryption) to encrypt files." RTM Locker was  first documented  by Trellix earlier this month, describing its developers as a private ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) provider. It has its roots in a cybercrime group called Read The Manual (RTM) that's known to be active since at least 2015. The group is notable for deliberately avoiding high-profile targets such as critical infrastructure, law enforcement, and hospitals so as to draw as little attention as possible. It also lev...

Microsoft has confirmed that the  active exploitation of PaperCut servers  is linked to attacks that are designed to deliver Cl0p and LockBit ransomware families. The tech giant's threat intelligence team is attributing a subset of the intrusions to a financially motivated actor it tracks under the name  Lace Tempest  (formerly DEV-0950), which overlaps with other hacking groups like FIN11, TA505, and Evil Corp. "In observed attacks, Lace Tempest ran multiple PowerShell commands to deliver a TrueBot DLL, which connected to a C2 server, attempted to steal LSASS credentials, and injected the  TrueBot payload  into the conhost.exe service," Microsoft  said  in a series of tweets. The next phase of the attack entailed the deployment of Cobalt Strike Beacon implant to conduct reconnaissance, move laterally across the network using WMI, and exfiltrate files of interest via the file-sharing service MegaSync. Lace Tempest is a Cl0p ransomware affilia...

Threat actors are employing a previously undocumented "defense evasion tool" dubbed AuKill that's designed to disable endpoint detection and response (EDR) software by means of a Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver ( BYOVD ) attack. "The AuKill tool abuses an outdated version of the  driver  used by version 16.32 of the Microsoft utility,  Process Explorer , to disable EDR processes before deploying either a backdoor or ransomware on the target system," Sophos researcher Andreas Klopsch  said  in a report published last week. Incidents analyzed by the cybersecurity firm show the use of AuKill since the start of 2023 to deploy various ransomware strains such as Medusa Locker and LockBit. Six different versions of the malware have been identified to date. The oldest AuKill sample features a November 2022 compilation timestamp. The  BYOVD technique  relies on threat actors misusing a legitimate, but out-of-date and exploitable, driver signed by Microsof...

Fortra, the company behind Cobalt Strike, shed light on a zero-day remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in its GoAnywhere MFT tool that has come under  active   exploitation  by ransomware actors to steal sensitive data. The high-severity flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-0669  (CVSS score: 7.2), concerns a case of pre-authenticated command injection that could be abused to achieve code execution. The issue was patched by the company in version 7.1.2 of the software in February 2023, but not before it was weaponized as a zero-day since January 18. Fortra, which worked with Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, said it was made aware of suspicious activity associated with some of the file transfer instances on January 30, 2023. "The unauthorized party used CVE-2023-0669 to create unauthorized user accounts in some MFTaaS customer environments," the company  said . "For a subset of these customers, the unauthorized party leveraged these user accounts to download file...

Threat actors behind the LockBit ransomware operation have developed new artifacts that can encrypt files on devices running Apple's macOS operating system. The development, which was  reported  by the MalwareHunterTeam over the weekend, appears to be the first time a big-game ransomware crew has created a macOS-based payload. Additional samples identified by  vx-underground  show that the macOS variant has been available since November 11, 2022, and has managed to evade detection by anti-malware engines until now. LockBit is a  prolific cybercrime crew  with ties to Russia that has been active since late 2019, with the threat actors releasing two major updates to the locker in 2021 and 2022. According to statistics  released by Malwarebytes  last week, LockBit emerged as the second most used ransomware in March 2023 after Cl0p, accounting for 93 successful attacks. An analysis of the new macOS version ("locker_Apple_M1_64") reveals that it...

A new strain of malware developed by threat actors likely affiliated with the FIN7 cybercrime group has been put to use by the members of the now-defunct Conti ransomware gang, indicating collaboration between the two crews. The malware, dubbed  Domino , is primarily designed to facilitate follow-on exploitation on compromised systems, including delivering a lesser-known information stealer that has been advertised for sale on the dark web since December 2021. "Former members of the  TrickBot/Conti syndicate  [...] have been using Domino since at least late February 2023 to deliver either the Project Nemesis information stealer or more capable backdoors such as Cobalt Strike," IBM Security X-Force security researcher Charlotte Hammond  said  in a report published last week. FIN7 , also called Carbanak and ITG14, is a prolific  Russian-speaking cybercriminal syndicate  that's known to employ an array of custom malware to deploy additional payloads ...

Threat actors associated with the Vice Society ransomware gang have been observed using a bespoke PowerShell-based tool to fly under the radar and automate the process of exfiltrating data from compromised networks. "Threat actors (TAs) using built-in  data exfiltration   methods  like [living off the land binaries and scripts] negate the need to bring in external tools that might be flagged by security software and/or human-based security detection mechanisms," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Ryan Chapman  said . "These methods can also hide within the general operating environment, providing subversion to the threat actor." Vice Society , tracked by Microsoft under the name DEV-0832, is an extortion-focused hacking group that emerged on the scene in May 2021. It's known to rely on ransomware binaries sold on the criminal underground to meet its goals. In December 2022, SentinelOne detailed the group's use of a ransomware variant, dubbed  PolyVi...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the tactics of a "rising" cybercriminal gang called "Read The Manual" (RTM) Locker that functions as a private ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) provider and carries out opportunistic attacks to generate illicit profit. "The 'Read The Manual' Locker gang uses affiliates to ransom victims, all of whom are forced to abide by the gang's strict rules," cybersecurity firm Trellix said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The business-like set up of the group, where affiliates are required to remain active or notify the gang of their leave, shows the organizational maturity of the group, as has also been observed in other groups, such as  Conti ." RTM , first documented by ESET in February 2017,  started off  in 2015 as a banking malware targeting businesses in Russia via drive-by downloads, spam, and phishing emails. Attack chains mounted by the group have since  evolved  to deploy a ransomwa...

It's the second Tuesday of the month, and Microsoft has released another set of security updates to fix  a total of 97 flaws  impacting its software, one of which has been actively exploited in ransomware attacks in the wild. Seven of the 97 bugs are rated Critical and 90 are rated Important in severity. Interestingly, 45 of the shortcomings are remote code execution flaws, followed by 20 elevation of privilege vulnerabilities. The updates also follow fixes for 26 vulnerabilities in its Edge browser that were released over the past month. The security flaw that's come under active exploitation is  CVE-2023-28252  (CVSS score: 7.8), a privilege escalation bug in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," Microsoft said in an advisory, crediting researchers Boris Larin, Genwei Jiang, and Quan Jin for reporting the issue. CVE-2023-28252 is the fourth privilege escalatio...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added  five security flaws  to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. This includes three high-severity flaws in the Veritas Backup Exec Agent software (CVE-2021-27876, CVE-2021-27877, and CVE-2021-27878) that could lead to the execution of privileged commands on the underlying system. The flaws were  fixed  in a patch released by Veritas in March 2021. CVE-2021-27876  (CVSS score: 8.1) - Veritas Backup Exec Agent File Access Vulnerability CVE-2021-27877  (CVSS score: 8.2) - Veritas Backup Exec Agent Improper Authentication Vulnerability CVE-2021-27878  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Veritas Backup Exec Agent Command Execution Vulnerability Google-owned Mandiant, in a  report  published last week, revealed that an affiliate associated with the  BlackCat  (aka ALPHV and Noberus) ransomware operatio...

Taiwanese PC company MSI (short for Micro-Star International) officially confirmed it was the victim of a cyber attack on its systems. The company said it "promptly" initiated incident response and recovery measures after detecting "network anomalies." It also said it alerted law enforcement agencies of the matter. That said, MSI did not disclose any specifics about when the attack took place and if it entailed the exfiltration of any proprietary information, including source code. "Currently, the affected systems have gradually resumed normal operations, with no significant impact on financial business," the company said in a  brief notice  shared on Friday. In a  regulatory filing  with the Taiwan Stock Exchange, it said that it's setting up enhanced controls of its network and infrastructure to ensure the security of data. MSI is further urging users to obtain firmware/BIOS updates only from its official website, and refrain from downloading ...

The Iranian nation-state group known as  MuddyWater  has been observed carrying out destructive attacks on hybrid environments under the guise of a ransomware operation. That's according to new findings from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team, which discovered the threat actor targeting both on-premises and cloud infrastructures in partnership with another emerging activity cluster dubbed  DEV-1084 . "While the threat actors attempted to masquerade the activity as a standard ransomware campaign, the unrecoverable actions show destruction and disruption were the ultimate goals of the operation," the tech giant  revealed  Friday. MuddyWater  is the name assigned to an  Iran-based actor  that the U.S. government has publicly connected to the country's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). It's been known to be active since at least 2017. It's also tracked by the cybersecurity community under various names, including Boggy Serpens, Co...

Microsoft said it teamed up with Fortra and Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC) to tackle the abuse of Cobalt Strike by cybercriminals to distribute malware, including ransomware. To that end, the tech giant's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) revealed that it secured a  court order  in the U.S. to "remove illegal, legacy copies of Cobalt Strike so they can no longer be used by cybercriminals." While Cobalt Strike, developed and maintained by Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), is a legitimate post-exploitation tool used for adversary simulation, illegal cracked versions of the software have been weaponized by threat actors over the years. Ransomware groups, in particular, have leveraged Cobalt Strike after obtaining initial access to a target environment to escalate privileges, lateral move across the network, and deploy file-encrypting malware. "The ransomware families associated with or deployed by cracked copies of Cobalt Strike have been link...