social engineering | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor tracked as Gamaredon has been attributed to two new Android spyware tools called BoneSpy and PlainGnome , marking the first time the adversary has been discovered using mobile-only malware families in its attack campaigns. "BoneSpy and PlainGnome target former Soviet states and focus on Russian-speaking victims," Lookout said in an analysis. "Both BoneSpy and PlainGnome collect data such as SMS messages, call logs, phone call audio, photos from device cameras, device location, and contact lists." Gamaredon , also called Aqua Blizzard, Armageddon, BlueAlpha, Hive0051, Iron Tilden, Primitive Bear, Shuckworm, Trident Ursa, UAC-0010, UNC530, and Winterflounder, is a hacking group affiliated with Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). Last week, Recorded Future's Insikt Group revealed the threat actor's use of Cloudflare Tunnels as a tactic to conceal its staging infrastructure hosting malicious payload...

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...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

The threat actors linked to the Black Basta ransomware have been observed switching up their social engineering tactics , distributing a different set of payloads such as Zbot and DarkGate since early October 2024. "Users within the target environment will be email bombed by the threat actor, which is often achieved by signing up the user's email to numerous mailing lists simultaneously," Rapid7 said . "After the email bomb, the threat actor will reach out to the impacted users." As observed back in August, the attackers make initial contact with prospective targets on Microsoft Teams, pretending to be support personnel or IT staff of the organization. In some instances, they have also been observed impersonating IT staff members within the targeted organization. Users who end up interacting with the threat actors are urged to install legitimate remote access software such as AnyDesk, ScreenConnect, TeamViewer, and Microsoft's Quick Assist. The Window...

A previously undocumented threat activity cluster dubbed Earth Minotaur is leveraging the MOONSHINE exploit kit and an unreported Android-cum-Windows backdoor called DarkNimbus to facilitate long-term surveillance operations targeting Tibetans and Uyghurs. "Earth Minotaur uses MOONSHINE to deliver the DarkNimbus backdoor to Android and Windows devices, targeting WeChat, and possibly making it a cross-platform threat," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen and Daniel Lunghi said in an analysis published today. "MOONSHINE exploits multiple known vulnerabilities in Chromium-based browsers and applications, requiring users to update software regularly to prevent attacks." Countries affected by Earth Minotaur's attacks span Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Nepal, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the U.S. MOONSHINE first came to light in September 2019 as part of cyber attacks targeting t...

The North Korea-aligned threat actor known as Kimsuky has been linked to a series of phishing attacks that involve sending email messages that originate from Russian sender addresses to ultimately conduct credential theft. "Phishing emails were sent mainly through email services in Japan and Korea until early September," South Korean cybersecurity company Genians said . "Then, from mid-September, some phishing emails disguised as if they were sent from Russia were observed." This entails the abuse of VK's Mail.ru email service, which supports five different alias domains, including mail.ru, internet.ru, bk.ru, inbox.ru, and list.ru. Genians said it has observed the Kimsuky actors leveraging all the aforementioned sender domains for phishing campaigns that masquerade as financial institutions and internet portals like Naver. Other phishing attacks have entailed sending messages that mimic Naver's MYBOX cloud storage service and aim to trick users into ...

Over a dozen malicious Android apps identified on the Google Play Store that have been collectively downloaded over 8 million times contain malware known as SpyLoan, according to new findings from McAfee Labs. "These PUP (potentially unwanted programs) applications use social engineering tactics to trick users into providing sensitive information and granting extra mobile app permissions, which can lead to extortion, harassment, and financial loss," security researcher Fernando Ruiz said in an analysis published last week. The newly discovered apps purport to offer quick loans with minimal requirements to attract unsuspecting users in Mexico, Colombia, Senegal, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Tanzania, Peru, and Chile. The 15 predatory loan apps are listed below. Five of these apps that are still available for download from the official app store are said to have made changes to comply with Google Play policies. Préstamo Seguro-Rápido, seguro (com.prestamoseguro.ss ) P...

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...

Dive into the evolution of phishing and malware evasion techniques and understand how attackers are using increasingly sophisticated methods to bypass security measures. The Evolution of Phishing Attacks "I really like the saying that 'This is out of scope' said no hacker ever. Whether it's tricks, techniques or technologies, hackers will do anything to evade detection and make sure their attack is successful," says Etay Maor, Chief Security Strategist at Cato Networks and member of Cato CTRL . Phishing attacks have transformed significantly over the years. 15-20 years ago, simple phishing sites were sufficient for capturing the crown jewels of the time - credit card details. Today, attacks and defense methods have become much more sophisticated, as we'll detail below. "This is also the time where the "cat-and-mouse" attack-defense game began," says Tal Darsan, Security Manager and member of Cato CTRL. At the time, a major defense technique against credit card phishing sites inv...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Sapphire Sleet is estimated to have stolen more than $10 million worth of cryptocurrency as part of social engineering campaigns orchestrated over a six-month period. These findings come from Microsoft, which said that multiple threat activity clusters with ties to the country have been observed creating fake profiles on LinkedIn, posing as both recruiters and job seekers to generate illicit revenue for the sanction-hit nation. Sapphire Sleet, which is known to be active since at least 2020, overlaps with hacking groups tracked as APT38 and BlueNoroff. In November 2023, the tech giant revealed that the threat actor had established infrastructure that impersonated skills assessment portals to carry out its social engineering campaigns. One of the main methods adopted by the group for over a year is to pose as a venture capitalist, deceptively claiming an interest in a target user's company in order to set up an online meeting. Targ...

Five alleged members of the infamous Scattered Spider cybercrime crew have been indicted in the U.S. for targeting employees of companies across the country using social engineering techniques to harvest credentials and using them to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and break into crypto accounts to steal digital assets worth millions of dollars. All of the accused parties have been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy, and one count of aggravated identity theft. They include - Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 23, aka AD, of College Station, Texas Noah Michael Urban, 20, aka Sosa and Elijah, of Palm Coast, Florida Evans Onyeaka Osiebo, 20, of Dallas, Texas Joel Martin Evans, 25, aka joeleoli, of Jacksonville, North Carolina; and Tyler Robert Buchanan, 22, aka tylerb, of the U.K. While the name Scattered Spider  is not directly referenced in the indictment document, it has been described as "a loosely organized financi...

The Iranian threat actor known as TA455 has been observed taking a leaf out of a North Korean hacking group's playbook to orchestrate its own version of the Dream Job campaign targeting the aerospace industry by offering fake jobs since at least September 2023. "The campaign distributed the SnailResin malware, which activates the SlugResin backdoor," Israeli cybersecurity company ClearSky said in a Tuesday analysis. TA455, also tracked by Google-owned Mandiant as UNC1549 and by PwC as Yellow Dev 13, is assessed to be a sub-cluster within APT35 , which is known by the names CALANQUE, Charming Kitten, CharmingCypress, ITG18, Mint Sandstorm (formerly Phosphorus), Newscaster, TA453, and Yellow Garuda. Affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the group is said to share tactical overlaps with clusters referred to as Smoke Sandstorm (previously Bohrium) and Crimson Sandstorm (previously Curium). Earlier this February, the adversarial collecti...

Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK aka North Korea) have been found embedding malware within Flutter applications, marking the first time this tactic has been adopted by the adversary to infect Apple macOS devices. Jamf Threat Labs, which made the discovery based on artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal platform earlier this month, said the Flutter-built applications are part of a broader activity that includes malware written in Golang and Python. It's currently not known how these samples are distributed to victims, and if it has been used against any targets, or if the attackers are switching to a new delivery method. That said, North Korean threat actors are known to engage in extensive social engineering efforts targeting employees of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance businesses. "We suspect these specific examples are testing," Jaron Bradley, director at Jamf Threat Labs, told The Hacker News. "It's p...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new ransomware family called Ymir that was deployed in an attack two days after systems were compromised by a stealer malware called RustyStealer. "Ymir ransomware introduces a unique combination of technical features and tactics that enhance its effectiveness," Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said . "Threat actors leveraged an unconventional blend of memory management functions – malloc, memmove, and memcmp – to execute malicious code directly in the memory. This approach deviates from the typical sequential execution flow seen in widespread ransomware types, enhancing its stealth capabilities." Kaspersky said it observed the ransomware used in a cyber attack targeting an unnamed organization in Colombia, with the threat actors previously delivering the RustyStealer malware to gather corporate credentials. It's believed that the stolen credentials were used to gain unauthorized access to the company's n...